Return of the Super Movies! The one based on a toy

 

Title: Masters Of The Universe

What Year?: 1987

Classification: Runnerup/ Mashup

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (1/4)

 

Back when I came up with this technically, kind of retired feature, what I wanted was to cover movies that would surprise people, either because they were obscure or because their connections to the theme were less well-known. In its relatively short run, I definitely did plenty of both. But I still had a select list of movies I felt fit even if they weren’t technically related to comics or superheroes. Alas, I never quite got to these, mainly because the review count never went high enough to need them. After hitting yet another milestone for my reviews, I decided it was time for a rematch, and it happened I had been sitting on the one that definitely worked best. I present Masters Of The Universe, a movie based on a crass intersection of toys, television and other media that did in fact include comic books.

Our story begins in the world of Eternia, where Skeletor has actually defeated his adversary He Man and captured Castle Grayskull. With the help of a sorcerer type named Gwildor and an artifact called the Cosmic Key, He Man and a band of loyalists escape to another dimension, which naturally turns out to be mid-‘80s Earth. There, he meets a high schooler named Julie and her considerably more useful boyfriend Kevin. But Skeletor’s minions are already in pursuit, led by Evil-Lyn. He Man must prevail, or the evil overlord will become not just ruler of Eternia but the ultimate power of the multiverse!

Masters of the Universe was a 1987 film by the Cannon Group (see Superman 4, etc, etc, etc), directed by Gary Goddard from a script by David O’Dell (see… The Dark Crystal?). The film was based on the toy line He Man and Masters of the Universe by Mattel, launched in 1982, but officially not the Filmation animated series of the same name. The film starred Dolph Lundgren (see The Punisher) as He Man and Frank Langella as Skeletor, with Meg Foster (see They Live, Leviathan) as Evil-Lyn. Other cast included the late Billy Barty (see Willow) as Gwildor, an original character apparently based on Orko from the toy line and cartoon, Courtney Cox as Julie, and James Tolkan of the ongoing Back To The Future franchise as Detective Lubic. Music was composed by Bill Conti. The movie was a commercial disappointment, earning $17.3M against a $22M budget, contributing to the decline and eventual bankruptcy of the Cannon Group. The failure of the movie coincided with the decline of the toy line, which was discontinued in 1988. The film quickly achieved cult popularity on home video. It has remained available in a number of formats and platforms, including a 10-film multipack The Bombs, Babes and Blockbusters of the Cannon Group.

For my experiences, He Man/ MOTU is something that has remained in an odd blind spot. I had what must have been a fair-sized collection of the figures that I got more than a little obsessed with before they ended up broken or given away. I also can just remember the mini-comics with a certain nostalgia I never had for the show, which is my most immediate justification for including it here. My strongest recollections, however, are of the final days of the line (see my Rock Bots post), when the racks were packed with toys that even kid me considered goofy and gimmick-prone. By comparison, I can remember barely noticing the movie coming out, and the correlations of hindsight make it clear that it was hilariously doomed. Eventually, I did get to it, in part because of yet another comic, the excellent “Fragile Creatures” storyline of Concrete. Even with the most limited of attachments, I was immediately struck by just how mediocre this is.

Moving in, I have to say that the movie’s redeeming qualities come mostly from how little it owes to the toys or anything else. There’s a quite distinct visual style that captures the weird lasers-and-sorcery conceptual groundwork of the franchise while remaining very much its own thing (see Krull and the Cannon Hercules films for further comparisons). It’s of further note that most of the villains have no close counterparts elsewhere, leading to such bizarre and intriguing apparitions like the cyborg samurai Blade. By any appraisal, it’s Langella and the always hypnotic Foster who run away with the film as the lead villains. On that front, my one dissent is with those who find Skeletor (not to mention other Langella roles) to be hammy high camp. To me, this is so contrary to the senses that I feel like I could be watching a different film. This is not a gloating, posturing supervillain of cartoons, but a terrifyingly believable dictator whose subtlest gestures convey the clear expectation that others will obey or suffer the full price. The one thing I could wish for is that they had substituted the odd practical rig with an actual, Vader-style mask, which among other things would have preserved far more mystery about his nature and origin.

On the con side, the easy target is He Man himself, who has already been criticized as not doing much in his own movie. Here, the critics certainly aren’t wrong, yet haven’t gotten the whole of it. Lundgren brings genuine presence that could easily have eluded a “better” actor, and there is plenty of satisfying action in the film’s well-spaced fight sequences. More than that, there is true nobility as he defies Skeletor in the finale. Meanwhile, there’s more good vibes from Me Man’s allies and especially Tolkan as the cop. I can also put in a good word for Robert Duncan McNeill as the “comic relief” boyfriend. The one failure here is Cox, enough to drag the rating down against my original intentions, and I will admit I am at a loss to account for it. There’s nothing obviously “bad” about her performance or even her character. I simply cannot find anything interesting enough to justify her artificially inflated prominence. This shows blatantly in the saccharine “happy” ending. Even more telling are her interactions with Teela, which seem intended to show her own transformation into a self-reliant heroine, but really just demonstrate that her screentime would have been better spent on other characters that were already familiar.

That gets me to the “one scene”, and there was one more intriguing than any other. After the first big fight on Earth, we find Kevin has taken the lost Cosmic Key to a store that seems halfway between a records shop and an electronic store. He shows the artifact to the clerk, who immediately insists he has seen such things, with the amusing further claim, “It’s from Japan.” Meanwhile, we get one of our better looks at the semi-Maguffin, and it truly shows off the movie’s aesthetic. It looks like something that could be built with human or even pre-modern tech, but it’s still not quite clear what it would all do. Kevin does press a few of the controls, producing musical notes that he has the musical knowledge to identify. Finally, a light show appears from the artifact, which finally brings the clerk to admit that he has never seen its like before. Naturally, it’s going to be an important plot point that makes Kevin by far the most significant and useful character, even if it’s never admitted. One more intriguing detail is the soundtrack (a subject I’ve commented on a lot less often than I used to), uniformly good throughout the film. Here, it’s subdued enough to blend in with the tones from the artifact, a quite nice touch. It’s a good moment that shows solid world-building to boot, and one can genuinely debate how well it represents the film as a whole.

In closing, I find myself turning not to the rating but my own checkered history with the Cannon operation. When I first started doing reviews, I dealt with so many of their releases that I was literally turning them up at random. This fully reflected their influence on 1980s genre films, for good or ill, and I felt more than a little regret when I realized how long I had gone without reviewing a Cannon film before this review. But this cements exactly why I find this film so disappointing. Even beyond the issues I have already noted, the overriding feeling is diminishing returns. There are plenty of films in Cannon’s library that are certainly not “better” yet still far more entertaining, usually at a fraction of the cost. It’s as if the audacious creativity of Cannon’s loose-knit operation stalled out as soon as they got real money. (Then again, the most expensive SF/ fantasy film they ever did would have to be Lifeforce…) It all leaves this film as a sad footnote to a driving force of vintage genre films, technically decent yet disappointing. With that, I bid the film and its creators an almost fond farewell.

Featured Creature: The one that's an anthro murder mystery

 

Title: Link aka Link The Butler

What Year?: 1986

Classification: Mashup/ Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

In considering the possibilities for this feature, the biggest challenge has been defining an if possible limiting the scope of it. So far, my rule of thumb has been to stay outside the 1970s-‘80s timeframe I chose for my Space 1979 feature. However, I have definitely planned to cover some of the 1980s films I never got to elsewhere. With this review, I’m starting with a case and point, an egregiously representative ‘80s movie that I still never found to fit in with the runnerups and knockoffs of my previous feature. As we will see, this is first and foremost because of its unquestionable and audacious originality. Here is Link, possibly cinema’s only full-fledged anthropology horror film.

Our story begins with a roving POV shot of a nighttime city street, as the unseen stalker chases a cat and peers into a second-floor apartment. We then meet a college student named Jane and her professor Philip, a very British primatologist who doesn’t so much express sexism and colonialism as leave them an unspoken given. Jane is soon invited to come to the professor’s country estate, where he keeps a trio of primates as something between pets, servants and adopted children. The professor introduces her to his oldest and dominant charge, a former circus ape named Link who has willingly adopted wearing clothes and also learned to use matches. Tensions start to rise as Jane questions Philip’s harsh treatment of the apes and his critical assessment of their intelligence. Things take a strange and uncomfortable turn when the professor suddenly disappears, leaving Jane to manage the apes. As Link grows more unruly, she soon realizes that he is a danger both to the other animals and to humans. When her boyfriend and his buddies show up, Link goes on the warpath. Can Jane escape, or has the ape finally bested mankind?

Link was a British horror film made by EMI Films, a media conglomerate that had associated with MGM and Columbia. The production was directed by Australian filmmaker Richard Franklin, who optioned a story outline for the film in 1979 but did not obtain funding until after his success with the 1983 film Psycho II. The film starred American Elizabeth Shue as Jane following a breakthrough appearance in Karate Kid, with British veteran Terence Stamp as the professor. The title character/ creature Link was written as a chimp but portrayed by an orangutan known as Locke, with significant makeup and prosthetics used to change the appearance of the non-African ape. Jerry Goldsmith provided a score for the movie, noted for its similarities to his earlier score for Gremlins. The finished film was released in the US by (I hate my life) the Cannon Group, with significant cuts. The movie was reviewed by Cinemassacre in 2018, while the film was difficult to obtain except on VHS. In 2019, the film was released on DVD and Blu Ray by Kino Lorber, featuring a 103-minute cut apparently used for earlier VHS releases with additional “deleted” scenes as bonus features.

For my experiences, this is one of a fair number of films I first heard of from Cinemassacre (see Tourist Trap). I bought and viewed it in early 2020, after I had started this blog but before I got things in gear. It stood out in my memory as an odd movie that “should” have connected with me a lot more than it did, and a viewing for this review only emphasized how odd and uncomfortable it is. It’s classified as “horror”, but if anything, it’s a bit too “mainstream” for that, and the same applies even more so for science fiction. The “feel” I pick up from it is a Victorian murder mystery where several of the suspects happen to be non-human. It’s this pool of influence that best accounts for its surprisingly effective satirical tone, and also its curiously mild content, which is well within PG-13 or even “70s PG” levels, uncomfortable nudity and all. The sledgehammer blow that comes out of the cloud of fluff is a post-modern tone that rivals The Thing. Several key plot point, including the fate of the professor and one of the apes, only get murkier with analysis and repeat viewings. It’s all the more disconcerting that this is achieved with none of the supposedly “hallucinogenic” tricks of more routine genre films. As traditionalists like George Romero demonstrated all along, linear narration and camerawork show terror and madness better than trendy jump cuts and  random shock imagery ever did.

That still leaves the apes themselves. The elephant in the room here is that the movie clearly draws on dated and overoptimistic appraisals of primate intelligence. Here, as in many things, there is at least ambiguity. The apes at times seem a little too good at communicating their thoughts in human terms, but then the human characters, including the Homo-supremacist professor, consistently speak to them in normal English. There’s a further sense of a malign positive feedback loop with the professor, who treats them with contempt that he hides in his lectures to the students, but never quite descends into sadism for its own sake. What gets most intriguing is Link’s evident ability to hide his handiwork or play dumb. His appearance and mannerisms are disarming, almost certainly more so than a “real” adult chimp would be. That is enough to get away with several apparent mishaps that look ominous in hindsight, like the comical destruction of one of the manor’s only phones, but again, we never get a clear answer. The most unnerving development, albeit dictated the mystery conceit, is that he quickly learns to hide the bodies of humans and animals that he has killed, suggesting that he has some notion of human law and government. Things get even more darkly amusing when a surviving ape named Imp urges Jane to kill him, ultimately raising a little doubt how many of the deaths and misdeeds are committed by Link alone. 

At this point, I feel I must go a bit longer to discuss the finale and the buildup to it. The big plot twist is the disappearance of the professor, early and abrupt enough that it’s counterintuitively difficult to pinpoint when it actually happens. That is followed by the appearance of an animal trader and exterminator, worth further note as the one character who is clearly free from an anthropomorphic and romantic view of the apes. It’s at this point that the tone becomes disjointed, in no small part because of Jane’s irritating naivete. We get comical moments that still fit the discomforting mood as she locks Link outside like a disobedient pet. Things outwardly go into high gear once the college students/ creature fodder arrive (for once all male!), but to me, what follows mostly undermines what has so far been an intriguing and subtle movie. Part of the problem is certainly that the filmmakers still don’t step up to the level of action and outright carnage that would “earn” the R rating they got anyway. But there’s also a deeper sense that the movie never catches up with itself, and it shows especially in the Goldsmith score (see the Deep Rising soundtrack review). It’s good, as it should be, but what was lively and fittingly mischievous at the start never adjusts to the quite dark events that unfold (including what is surely an homage to King Kong). At a certain point, it starts to feel like the composer was given a pitch for a different movie than was actually made, which judging from the track record of novelizations might well be what happened.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and this time, I’m going with a “deleted” scene. I have to say be way of introduction that the DVD includes a startling 24 minutes of footage, of which I find only two or three that would definitely have improved the film as a whole. The last and most impressive finds the professor and Jane arguing more forcefully than usual about primate intelligence and how the researchers treat them. (I suspect this is “out of order”, since an immediately preceding scene already has the professor absent.) The professor, who previously told his students that apes can perform at a human level on intelligence tests, now asserts that even the best performance of an ape can still be equaled or bettered by a human child. Jane retorts that an ape might not “like” exercises on human terms. At this point, the professor starts pulling plastic fruit out of what will be a fateful cabinet. He finally fumes, “We tried with real fruit, and let him eat what he got right”, obviously with no improvement. It’s one of the more thoughtful and (unfortunately) accurate reflections on the problems of non-human intelligence to come out of the minor wave of ‘80s ape movies, and one doesn’t have to agree with the professor to understand the pure frustration.

In conclusion, I feel like I need to explain why I have spent this much time on a movie with a mixed review. It should already be clear that this is a film with enough flaws and good points for a much longer analysis than this. In the proverbial light of day, the strongest indication of its quality and relevance is that its flaws remain as insightful as its strengths. It is worth further note as a film that changing social attitudes alone have ensured could never be made again. It is a good film, certainly worth the time and effort to watch, but perhaps just as well to rent or borrow rather than buy. With that, I am calling it a day.

Super Movies! The one where Superman takes everybody's nukes

 

Title: Superman 4: The Quest For Peace

What Year?: 1987

Classification: Weird Sequel/ Improbable Experiment

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

In the course of this and other features, I’ve regularly mentioned certain movies that I have meant to review but not gotten to for a very long time. This time, I’m finally getting to one of the movies that inspired me to start this feature. A further common denominator is that it’s one I heard of and saw well before I knew anything about its current reputation, in this case as perhaps the most legendarily bad example of its genre. Of course, with that kind of background, I’m practically obliged to be contrary. So here is Superman IV, a superhero movie that killed a franchise, a studio, and very possibly came close to killing the superhero genre.

Our story begins, after an opening credits sequence in space, with the most iconic of superheroes engaging in some mild-mannered rescues. Meanwhile, Clark Kent faces the sale of a family farm and the purchase of the Daily Planet by a sleazy tabloid publisher and his daughter. Things take an intriguing turn when a boy sends a letter asking Superman to rid the world of nuclear weapons. After reconnecting with Lois Lane, the hero takes his do-gooder vigilantism on the international circuit and starts rounding up the nukes of both the Soviets and his own country. Just when it looks like this might be interesting, the story shifts to Lex Luthor, who convinces a group of disgruntled arms merchants to fund a clone of Superman, for some reason created by throwing Kryptonian genetic material into the sun. The result is a weird superhuman who emerges as a sort of fiery stellar fetus and then metamorphoses into a leather-clad, golden-haired mutation. It’s up to Superman to defend the world from the abomination, but when the mutant leaves him for dead, is the world down for the count?

Superman IV was the only movie in the franchise produced by (why do I bother) the Cannon Group, after Ilya and Alexander Salkind withdrew following the commercial failures of Supergirl (see also Santa Claus). Christopher Reeve returned on the condition that the film would include an anti-nuclear message. The movie also brought back Margot Kidder as Lois Lane and Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, after their roles and characters were reduced or removed in Superman 3. Other cast included John Cryer as Luthor’s nephew Lenny and male model/ dancer Mark Pillow as the evil superhuman, referred to in the credits simply as the Nuclear Man. The final storyline had unacknowledged similarities to the 1977 short “Steel” by Alan Brennert, a frequent contributor to DC’s Superman comic, as well as Kurt Vonnegut’s classic 1950 story “Report On The Barnhouse Effect”.  Cannon reportedly edited the final film for a 90-minute running time, reportedly removing scenes that would have expanded or resolved several subplots. The film earned $36 million against a $17M budget, and was deemed a commercial failure for the already struggling studio. Cannon also optioned Marvel characters Spider Man and Captain America, but only the latter led to a completed film.

For my history, this is another movie I caught on 1990s TV. Long before that, I remember finding a tie in book, as far as I can recall a book of puzzles that also featured quizzes about the movie. By the time I got to it, I had already read Vonnegut’s story and I believe also Brennert’s singularly bleak tale, which I had to do a deep dive just to identify; and no, nobody else has discussed either story in connection with this movie. At the time, I didn’t consider it that much better or worse than the other Superman movies I had encountered. (Then again, I would probably have said I actually liked Superman 3.) I was always intrigued just by the idea of a superhero against the military might of at least two mutually hostile powers, which has been enough to keep this one on my good side. I finally watched it again about the time I trashed the preceding movie for the Space 1979 Threequel Trilogy, and once I thought of this feature, it was right at the top of my list, initially as a companion piece for Supergirl. I suppose a major reason I’m finally getting to it now is that I finally found a good deal on another that has remained way up there, so I threw in a used copy of this one to round out the lineup. For once, I watched it very quickly, and coming out of it, I’m still very conflicted.

The foremost thing to be said about this movie is that it’s more interesting, if not frustrating, for what could have been done than at actually happens onscreen. Clearly, once they decided on the nuclear disarmament arc, it should have occupied a much larger part of the story, and they could have worked in the kind of detail covered by Vonnegut and Brennert. For example, it clearly wouldn’t work to disarm one side then the other, because the power still temporarily in possession of their weapons would just strike while they were ahead. So, it would have to be done in a series of raids against both sides, starting with the nuclear subs and other mobile platforms that would be difficult to find or hit in a conventional way. That in itself would offer a range of nightmarish scenarios for all concerned, from a shootout with missiles on one side and a nuclear reactor on the other to some fanatical commander rigging one or more nukes as a suicide bomb (about right for Hackman’s character in Crimson Tide!). Then, if and when it became clear that Superman couldn’t be stopped, things could go one of two ways. At worst, both superpowers would hit each other with everything they still had, and the superhero would have to try to block the worst of it. At best, their leaders would actually put their differences aside long enough to try to take out Superman, complete with a further propaganda campaign to discredit him, which would all tie in nicely with the movie’s other scrambled subplots.

In reality, almost all of what redeeming qualities the movie has come into play with the Nuclear Man story arc. It’s a very cheap redo of what Superman 2 already did better, yet it remains at a minimum far more memorable than any number of similar sequences in the age of Marvel movies. The evil superhuman is genuinely surreal, more like Joseph Goebbels’ vision of the superman than DC’s, complete with those weird retractable claws that take on a personality all their own. His battles with Superman quickly transcend the story into an allegorical clash of the avatars of chaos and order, unhindered if not actually aided by the stylized low-budget effects. Then there is surprising weight in the intervening segments. When the solar-man meets his creator, there’s a genuine clash of personalities, left inconclusive due to the superhuman’s incongruous weaknesses (which should really have applied to Superman all along). Then there is the meeting between the Clark Kent and Lois Lane after Superman’s defeat, which I seriously considered as the “one scene”. It’s a nuanced, sometimes awkward exchange that I’m not satisfied I’ve worked out. There’s an especially jarring moment when Clark Kent asks if something happened to Superman, which I rewound to try to figure out. While I can see a few interpretations, I stand by what first crossed my mind, which that the superhero has been beaten and demoralized badly enough that his Clark Kent persona and his Superman identity have dissociated from each other.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and what was always in the lead was a notorious sequence I remembered from all the way back. In the middle of the first battle, the Nuclear Man demolishes a section of the Great Wall of China. Naturally, Superman swoops in and saves a few tourists, which would have been good enough. But per this movie, it’s the Man of Steel’s nature to clean up a mess even if it isn’t his, so he sets about to rebuild the wall. Of course, I’m aware per the lore that it was planned to show him repairing the wall at superhuman speed, which someone then decided would cost too much. Instead, we see him turn on his laser eyes, and the bricks simply fly back into place. It’s surreal, it’s absurd, and I can appreciate the argument that it should have been done as planned or left out. However, as with many scenes in the movie, it is memorable, and to that extent, it is effective, which is certainly more than can be said for far too many recent superhero movies.

In closing, I’m ready to take on the question that inspired me to do this review and even the feature: Is this really “worse” than other Superman movies, especially Superman 3?  I have seen plenty of people argue the contrary, and I would have been more than happy to agree with them. Alas, for all the issues I had with the preceding movie, even I must admit that this one is not better by any objective standard. I still give it an effectively higher rating, simply to show that I find its flaws far more excusable, with no regret beyond once again wondering if I was too hard on Lady Snowblood. For context, Superman 3 had more than twice the budget, a third again the running time, and some of the biggest names to appear in the franchise, and squandered them all even in its better moments. By comparison, this movie took a low budget and an assortment of mutually conflicting premises, and managed to bring them together into something unique, in a tolerable 90-some minute length. In my book, that’s still enough to squeak by on the curve.

Image credit originalfilmart.com.

Space 1999! The One that was the first Marvel movie

 

Title: The Amazing Spider Man

What Year?: 1977

Classification: Prototype

Rating: Dear God WHY??!! (1/5)

 

In doing movie reviews for multiple features, one of the more complicated decisions is which films should go under which feature. The counterintuitive part is that the actual difficulty for me has never been in making the call, but assessing why I did it. It’s pretty much a matter of instinct; I can tell when something doesn’t “fit” long before I can say why. With this review, I’m making the most counterintuitive decision of all, by placing a superhero movie outside Super Movies, my superhero/ comic book movie feature. For once, it was something I seriously debated, but my assignment very much reflects its significance in the history of TV movies, as well as existing reservations whether it belonged with the ones I have done and want to do for the earlier feature. So here is The Amazing Spider Man, a feature-length Marvel movie made for television… and it’s terrible in more ways than you can easily imagine.

Our story begins with a credits sequence of a familiar costumed character climbing along the buildings of a city, all with transparently forced perspective shots. We then meet Peter Parker, an aspiring reporter who gets bitten by a spider while doing a story at a science lab that will have no further role in the story. He discovers he has gained the power to climb up walls among other superhuman feats, and soon begins fighting crime, in one case seemingly just by distracting the bad guy. Meanwhile, we also encounter a crew of bad guys who are perfecting mind control behind the cover of a sort of self-help cult. But rather than taking over the world, they are sending ordinary people on a wave of robberies. As the hero and the authorities try to unravel their plot, the bad guys come up with a new plan: They demand to be paid a ransom from the city, or 10 of their subjects will be ordered to commit suicide. Can our hero save the day, or has he already been brainwashed? I ask because I honestly can’t tell!

The Amazing Spider Man was a TV movie coproduced by Marvel and Danchuck Productions as a pilot for a TV series based on the character. Aside from Captain America serials made during World War 2, it was the first feature-length, live-action movie based on a Marvel character. The film was directed by the prolific E.W. Swackhamer, also credited for the pilot of Law and Order, starring grown-up Sound of Music actor Nicholas Hammond in the title role. Veteran character actor David White appeared as J. Jonah Jameson. The movie led to approval of a Spider Man TV series, which was cancelled after 13 episodes. It received theatrical release outside the US, with sufficient success that two “sequels” were put together with episodes and footage from the TV series. The next major treatment of the character came when (oh dear Logos) the Cannon Group optioned the property in 1985, but the project never left preproduction.

For my experiences, I probably first heard of this movie in Peter Nicholls’ Fantastic Films. What really stands out is that I knew enough about it to make the judgments outlined in the opening of this review well before actually seeing it. In the course of that time, I had seen commentators (notably Nicholls) who criticized it harshly and others who vocally identify as fans and defenders. Most of my further research went into figuring out the options for viewing it; I finally went with an online video I watched over the weekend before writing this review, probably not much better or worse in quality than actual 1970s video equipment. (When people ask if VHS is “that bad”, my answer has been that CRTs were worse.) I went through it with my usual intermittent attention span, and even with that factored in, I quickly reached two conclusions: This movie is convoluted and nearly incomprehensible in its story and editing; yet, it is also quite inexplicably boring.

Moving forward, it’s just as well to get the “good” out of the way. The movie’s effects and action sequences are decent, especially for TV, and there are good stretches that justify its relatively favorable “campy” reputation. The best of these is a scene where Spider Man clambers through a neighborhood, clearly portrayed with a combination of optical effects and forced-perspective camera work. A close second is a brawl with three armed martial artists, in which Spider Man disorients the goons by jumping from the floor to the ceiling. There’s further help from the very ‘70s music, which sounds eerily like the theme from SWAT (whose pilot was also directed by Swackhamer!). However, we already have problems on multiple fronts. The pacing is usually too uneven for real tension. At several points, Spider Man climbs in painfully unnatural postures that would do nothing but make him a bigger target. Then the real problem is, the hero has no true opposite number, despite a vast rogues’ gallery to choose from. There’s no Dr. Octopus, no Green Goblin, no Electro, any of whom could have been tailor-made for the cheesy low-budget treatment (though Doc Ock would be tricky). We don’t even get the Purple Man, who would have provided the mind control theme without the technobabble.

On the other side of the equation, the simple fact is that most of the movie is simply nothing happening. It’s further fragmented by bizarre editing, to the point that I literally couldn’t figure out what happens in a scene where Peter Parker prepares to jump off the Empire State Building. What’s worse is that there’s little if any corresponding dialogue, character development or world-building to fill the dead air. Far too many of the characters, including Peter Parker, are bland, undeveloped or just “there”.  The far too conspicuous exception is White as Jameson, who for once comes across as a nuanced character who cares about his job. The tipping point for me is the completely illogical plans of the villains. With the posited tech, they could rig any election, sell any product, convert people to any religion, or at least tell people to give them money. What they settle for instead is a few suicides that critical authority figure could easily write off as a coincidental cluster, which would have been an unnerving social commentary if someone actually said as much. The only thing that could really make this work is a literally psychotic villain like the Joker, Megavolt or for that matter the Purple Man, but again, the characterization is too bland for a leader to stand out, let alone seem interesting.

That leaves me with the “one scene”, and I actually considered several. The one that was ahead all along is a brief scene about 15 minutes from the end, where we find Spider Man injured and trying to hide from the bad guys. (Watching him try in his bright primary-colors suit makes for several amusing moments in itself.) He makes his way out of a back alley to a cab, which happens to be driven by a black guy. The cabby (played by the late and evidently accomplished Harry Caesar) remarks without looking that he is about to return to the company warehouse. He is surprised but not unduly alarmed when he sees the costumed hero. Spider Man promptly insists that he is coming from a costume party (in a bad part of town, in broad daylight…), which the cabby obviously disbelieves but doesn’t comment on. The driver becomes vocally skeptical when the hero tries to offer him payment for a ride, remarking, “You don’t even have pockets in that suit.” Finally, he says, “I ain’t driving no Spider Man to that part of town,” which from what we have seen would in fact be a reasonably well-off suburb. The cab drives away, and the next shot finds Spider Man riding inside a garbage truck. It’s a clever satire of the superhero premise (where do Clark Kent and Peter Parker leave their wallets???), complete with a more relevant take on race and society than plenty of later “message” movies. More than usual, the frustration is that the whole movie isn’t like this.

In closing, I will give one more reason why I have covered this movie here rather than elsewhere: Even compared to the unreleased/ direct-to-video Marvel movies of the 1980s and early ‘90s, the production values of this movie fall far below the minimum standards I would normally apply anywhere but here. At this point, it would be easy to say that it shouldn’t be held to the same standards as theatrical movies. But this was intended to be a high-profile TV movie, at the height of the artform, and on top of that, the people involved had enough confidence in their product to make the jump to a theatrical run. Still, the core problem is not that it is “bad”, nor that it should have been better. It is that this could have been more entertaining, more memorable and flat-out better-looking if it was “worse”. What was really needed here was either a serious approach that brought out the darker elements of the material, or else the kind of high-energy camp that the ‘60s Batman series brought to the table. With neither in evidence, all that remains is a bland and forgettable TV movie from an era when the artform was at its peak.

Revenge of the Revenant Review 19: The one that started as another movie's joke

 

Title: Hard Rock Zombies

What Year?: 1985

Classification: Unnatural Experiment/ Evil Twin

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (1/4)

 

I’m back with another zombie movie review, closer together than they’ve been since I did the first 12 for my “main” list. Because coincidence is a harsh mistress, I have another one I “had” to do, and it’s one that genuinely made me wonder if I was too hard on The Beyond. (No, I wasn’t.) It is one of the strangest I have considered for the feature, with an even stranger production history, but it has the unfortunate further distinction of failing to translate this into a relatively good movie. With that, I present Hard Rock Zombies, a movie where the zombies do indeed rock, but whether they do it hard is open for debate.

Our story begins with a rocker named Jessie and his band that is clearly never getting off the ground on the way to their next gig, despite a warning from a teenish admirer. As it turns out, the townspeople are haters who murder the lot of them, without considering that this is probably doing the artform a favor. However, their admirer Cassie plays a recording at their graves that brings them back to life. Naturally, they take their revenge on their murderers, including  patriarch who turns out to be none other than Hitler. More surprisingly, they still show up to perform for a talent scout. Meanwhile, the Nazis they dispatch come back to life and start munching on townspeople, who are helpless despite (if not because of) advice from several inexplicably well-read experts on the undead. Soon, the zombies are after Cassie, for reasons that are best written off as incoherent. It’s up to Jessie and the band to save her from the disaster they started!

Hard Rock Zombies was directed and cowritten by Krishna Shah, a Bombay-born émigré who worked mainly in TV and documentaries. The film was made in 1983 an expansion of a “movie within a movie” originally filmed for his own film American Drive-In; both were ultimately released in 1985. The role of Jessie was given to E.J. Curse, a bassist for the band Silent Rage. Midget Phil Fondacaro appeared in both Hard Rock Zombies and American Drive-In, with the latter film referencing his role as an Ewok in Return of the Jedi.  The finished film was distributed by the Cannon Group (why do I bother?). It was released on DVD in 2004, by an operation identified as Blue Laser; this version is in “full screen” format and may be a transfer from VHS. As of this writing, it remains available in Netflix’s disc catalog.

For my experiences, I heard of this one from the Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, but didn’t get to it until well within the last 3 or 4 years. In hindsight, a big part of this was that it never felt appealing to me. I was so far out of the ‘80s music scene that I literally hear more of it now than in the actual 1980s, and I still have only ever gotten into a few artists. (The Pretenders and Blondie rule.) As for the zombies, it was clear from casual descriptions that this was the opposite of what I got into the genre for. As I keep saying, the kind of zombie movie I appreciate most are the ones with tight, “traditional” narratives, whereas this one is willful chaos. Once I got a look at it, I quickly concluded that even compared to other movies in this general style, especially Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and the eerily similar Chopper Chicks In Zombietown, this is inferior in both coherence and overall quality, to the point that I debated whether I had finally found a movie “too bad” for this feature. I forged ahead because this is the one that I simply couldn’t leave out, based on oddity alone, and because this is one you simply don’t go through without telling the tale.

To give this movie a proper appraisal, it’s necessary to start with the story and the main characters, which in a movie like this is practically counterintuitive. Plenty has already been said about whether the band qualifies as “hard rock” or for that matter “rock”. For me, it will be sufficient to say that even I can tell their style owes more to the 1970s and even the ‘60s than contemporary “heavy metal”, and I consider this the main reason the music is at least intermittently listenable. (To really understand, you would have to have survived the ‘90s rap craze...) Of the band members, only Jessie really emerges as a character, and he’s likable enough, with his most redeeming quality being his obviously sincere belief in both his own talent and that of his band mates. The conflict set up with the puritanical townsfolk (effectively the same as Chopper Chicks, not that it’s a novelty) is handled effectively enough to root for the band, if only because their act is about as threatening as a pet rock. It’s all the more amusing to see the undead rockers glide through the streets, with more choreographed finesse than we have seen from them on stage. Unfortunately, things take a very bad turn with the relationship between Jessie and Cassie, which in itself could be accepted as Platonic or nearly so, but keeps getting cringier and cringier as his ballade to her is repeated.

On the other side is what always really gets talked about, the zombies and the totally surreal visuals. It is here that the movie has the strongest similarities to Chopper Chicks, and most clearly shows how much that film improved on the premise. What should be most telling here is that, on viewing the film with its history in mind, I had no trouble making several guesses about which scenes were originally in American Drive-In. The slippery slope actually starts with a random murder in the opening scene, by a blonde siren who will account for fewer casualties after she comes back from the dead. Once the Nazis start reanimating, we get a range of strange sight gags and sequences, egregiously a dwarf who literally eats himself. The most unfortunate part is that when played straight, these are grim ghouls with a range of responses, including a bizarre posited fear of the brains of the living that actually allows the townspeople to push them back temporarily. When the story tries to get laughs out of them, things usually go downhill. In many ways, the strangest and most entertaining moments are from the living, notably a talent scout who praises the band after liberal self-medication and a young woman who continues to converse with her boyfriend’s severed head. The most truly surreal character is that of the siren, who spends much of the time dancing in place while mayhem unfolds around her.

For the “one scene”, this is the part where I came closest to giving up entirely. Nonetheless, there was an early sequence that caught my attention, in no small part because it actually advances what plot there is in this movie. While the townspeople are complaining and scheming, we find Jessie alone, grooving with his guitar. All the more surprisingly, he actually sounds pretty good, about right for the edgy side of late ‘60s-early ‘70s rock. While he strums, a tarantula comes along, seemingly drawn by the beat. When it starts to climb on Jessie’s hand, he promptly knocks it aside and squashes it, then resumes playing. Somehow, the music not only reanimates the spider but makes it whole enough to keep coming. This time, Jessie smashes it more gruesomely than before, with no immediate reaction. Before he starts strumming, however, he puts a glass over the creature. As the riffs keep coming, the spider’s legs again begin to move, in a rhythm that could be in time with the elemental chords. It all makes next to no sense, but for this brief moment and a few more like it, the movie works on its own anarchic terms.

In closing, I will not mince words: I consider this absolutely the worst movie I have reviewed for this feature, though I still have one or two under consideration that could give it a run for its money. In fact, the difference in quality compared to other movies is great enough that I considered giving it the “unrated” rating, previously given to Cemetery Man and Dead Alive. What stopped me is that there is little if anything here that can be considered willfully extreme or controversial, as those movies clearly were. That is truly the problem here. Despite some trappings of social commentary, this is a movie that does not offend (at least on purpose) simply because it has no point to make. Even if it is allowed to be no worse as a movie than other films covered here, which I can grant for Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and maybe Video Dead, it would still fall far behind them in effectiveness. If anything, it is the borderline-pretentious self-awareness of the former film that could have pulled this one through. Instead, it lets its potential slip away in a final act that only ramps up the random, right where Chopper Chicks pulls through. As usual, there are still far worse zombie movies out there that were never on my radar for inclusion here, but one would be hard pressed to find one that’s more disappointing.

Space 1979: The one with a secular rapture

 

Title: The Quiet Earth

What Year?: 1985

Classification: Mashup/ Prototype/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: What The Hell??? (3/5)

 

In the course of this feature, I’ve already commented regularly that there’s a lot of “random” in the lineup. There’s a flip side to this, however, which is that sometimes a review gets me thinking of a movie I wouldn’t have considered otherwise. Then if I do decide to give it a review, it’s often after enough time that it will feel a lot more random than it really is. This time around, I have another of those movies, one I had thought of occasionally connection with other movies I’ve reviewed but probably wouldn’t have gotten to if I hadn’t gotten hold of it while making up my mind about some other material. Here is The Quiet Earth, a post-apocalyptic movie with one of the strangest apocalypses on record.

Our story begins with an older but not quite elderly man wakened by an alarm clock, and just the sight of him getting out of bed makes it clear that this is not our familiar world. As the following day unfolds, we see that he is the last man in an apparently deserted world. He continues to try to find others, however, making radio broadcasts and leaving signs; more curiously, he is surprised when he runs across the occasional dead body. After a while, he goes on a streak of cathartic destruction with an oversized construction vehicle, only to end up literally on the brink of suicide. He pulls through and forges on long enough to meet up with a woman and later a racially ambiguous soldier. As they share their experiences, we finally learn that the vast majority of the human population has simply vanished without a trace, something the learned protagonist attributes to a kind of interdimensional rift. He gradually reveals his own further secret: He was part of a top secret project that he believes caused the event. As new disturbances unfold around them, he arrives at a plan to close the rift and perhaps return the rest of humanity to Earth. But one of them may have to go to the other side forever!

The Quiet Earth was possibly the first “major” sci fi/ fantasy film made New Zealand, whose film industry would go on to create the Lord of the Rings franchise (see Dead Alive). The film was officially based on a 1981 novel of the same name, though many critics and film scholars regard it as more directly based on the 1959 film The World, The Flesh And The Devil. The film  starred the late Bruno Lawrence as the protagonist Zac Hobson, Alison Routledge as the lady Joanne and Pete Smith as the soldier Api. All three actors were born or residing New Zealanders, with Smith being of Maori ancestry. Smith’s character is likewise identified as Maori in the novel, though this is not explicitly stated in the movie. The film was released theatrically in the US in late 1985, with an estimated box office of $2.12 million. At least one VHS release has the logo of the Cannon Group. It has been frequently praised among critics and historians of science fiction, including astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson.

This is one more movie I heard of long before I watched it, which I have come to suspect is a major factor in its relatively good reputation. It really came back on my radar when I mentioned it in my review of Night of the Comet. I brought it up then simply as an example of the very old cliché of a post-apocalyptic world where buildings, goods and infrastructure are somehow left intact enough for the few survivors to wander through. As I pointed out in the earlier review, this “tidy apocalypse” conceit was getting strained even in 1984. What stands out on further consideration is that Night of the Comet moved the concept from the realm of “realistic” post-apocalypse drama to the arguably more forgiving realm of comedy, where it has continued to pop up in the likes of Zombieland and The Last Man on Earth. Given this context, the New Zealanders’ offering is a curious step backwards, particularly when compared to American fare. Next to this movie, even the oddly subdued Defcon 4 is action-packed escapism.

With that in mind, it must be said that The Quiet Earth gets a lot of things right. Its version of the end of the world is post-modern enough to be oddly convincing on its own terms, like a cross between the theology of Tim LaHaye and the cosmology of Charles Fort. There is some further effort to show the kind of disorder and ensuing decay that would really occur if humans somehow disappeared overnight. It’s particularly amusing to see the survivors have to wend their way carefully past wrecked and abandoned vehicles, gridlocked even in death. Most impressively, it has the maturity to raise the problems of race, sexuality and colonialism without turning into a self-congratulatory “message” movie. I find it especially unfortunate to compare this with The Manitou less than a decade earlier, which for all its well-meaning gestures still left a non-native actor with the burden of portraying a character more overtly “native” than the actual natives.

The simple and obvious “problem” in all this is that once the world and the characters are established, the movie struggles to give them much to do in a film barely over 90 minutes. What’s entirely counterintuitive, but by no means unique, is that this becomes more pronounced after the survivors start meeting up. The first third is a poignant vision of existential angst as we follow Hobson’s struggles. When he meets Joanne, there are some good moments, but the pair simply don’t click, romantically or on any other level. Api gets even shorter shrift, and his character is downright problematic; he repeatedly refuses to talk about his past, even when the details might be in his favor, but he doesn’t have the level of introspection and guilt we see in Hobson, or much time to try. It doesn’t help that he and Joanne finally warm up to each other more abruptly and randomly than players in an adult film, which in hindsight is more cringey for the lady’s change of heart than any intended racial angle. All these issues merely aggravate the fact that Hobson’s eventual plan makes absolutely no sense, and if anything it will sound more coherent in my summary than it ever does in the movie. Even if it works, he has no way to know beforehand that it won’t not only kill him but finish destroying the world. Then that all leads to the surreal final shot, which is beautiful and terrifying enough to redeem a lesser film but here feels like an excuse to cut to the credits without having to show what actually happened.

That still leaves me with the “one scene”, and I could have picked a few. The absolute standout, though, is tellingly while the protagonist is still alone. Toward the close of the third act, he sets up a crowd of life-sized cutouts for what looks like a garden party at an expensive house. As he makes his preparations, he remarks a likeness of Hitler, “I’m a busy man. Besides, you had your turn.” After the wiring is done, he goes to an overlooking balcony and delivers a speech to the well-lighted assembly below, accompanied by tapes of cheers from the crowd. Here, he makes his first confession that he worked on “projects which I knew could be used for evil purposes”, promptly adding, “For the common good!” He goes on to talk about the temptations of wealth and power (at one point with a cutaway to Hitler and Nixon), before declaring himself president “of this quiet Earth”. As he reaches the climax of his speech, the lights and sound suddenly go out, part of what we see is a blackout of the city around him. (Later, he will bring in generators.) This is followed with a brief but pointed shot of our protagonist in the dark, his attempts at even ironic self-glorification undone by inevitable entropy.

That leaves me, as usual, with the rating. After Night of the Comet and especially Defcon 4, this is admittedly a case of a lower rating going to a better movie. I freely acknowledge that this has a lot to do with my personal reactions to it. On a certain level, I find this movie the embodiment of what happens when “mainstream” talent tries to move into sci fi. They come across like a rich kid trying to impress the chess club, self-consciously intellectual but still not as “smart” as they want to be or think they are. Of course, the production values, acting and overall quality are well above average for the genre, particularly at a time when it was still struggling to rise above its “low budget” roots. But if those were the only things that mattered to people who really love science fiction, we would be watching Kramer Vs. Kramer, not Dark Star.  Fortunately, this is a case where those involved could at least read the lay of the land well enough to improve on what came before. To me personally, this is exactly the kind of movie where the literal “What the Hell?” is a compliment as much as a complaint. Maybe I don’t “get” it, but I can certainly appreciate it.

Image credit 3GpCell Covers, a Portuguese language site.

Space 1979: The one with a kid and Stan Winston

 

Title: Invaders From Mars

What Year?: 1986

Classification: Weird Sequel/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Downright Decent! (4/5)

 

One of many things I’ve thought about on and off is the “remake” phenomenon. It’s long been fashionable to complain about the long cycle of remakes of 1970s and 1980s sci fi and horror movies, and the very real toll undoubtedly taken on original projects. But the overlooked flipside is that the 1980s was arguably when remakes came into their own, and certainly when the category had its greatest successes. I had given thought to several examples for this feature with varying degrees of seriousness: The ‘70s King Kong (there’s always an outlier), The Blob, Cat People, or by broader definitions Outland and Return to Oz.  Then there’s The Thing, a remake so successful in its own right that it certainly didn’t fit in here. The one I’ve finally settled on (if you don’t count Flash Gordon) is also the one that was on my radar all along, a remake which if it didn’t challenge the original certainly went in its own direction, yet still ended up largely dismissed or forgotten. I present Invaders From Mars, the 1986 version, and I’m really starting to hate that year just for how much of a laughing stock it has made of my original timeline for this feature.

Our story begins, after a credits sequence that looks and sounds almost exactly like Total Recall, with a kid who sees strange lights outside his window. His parents assure him nothing is wrong, but his father goes out to investigate. In the morning, Dad is acting strange, while the boy’s teacher is apparently acting as weird as usual during a frog dissection. Soon, the boy is noticing more people around him aren’t themselves. He soon turns to the school nurse, while the teacher gets suspicious after he catches her eating one of the frogs. He turns the tables and follows her to an isolated sand pit, where he discovers a submerged UFO commanded by the Supreme Intelligence, a creature that looks like a giant living brain. It turns out the aliens have been capturing the townspeople and injecting them with mind-controlling implants, visible on the back of their necks if not covered, presumably as a springboard to world conquest. The kid’s only chance is an open-minded general, who believes enough of his story to uncover a few infiltrators in his own ranks. As the finale ensues, the army closes in on the aliens’ lair, but not before the nurse and the kid are captured!

Invaders From Mars was a remake of the 1953 film of the same name, directed by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre auteur Tobe Hooper from a script cowritten by Dan O’Bannon, the creator of Alien (and Dark Star). It was the second film the pair were involved in by the notorious Cannon Group, following Lifeforce the previous year. The film starred ‘70s stalwart Karen Black as Nurse Magnusson with her own son Hunter Carson as the kid David Gardner. Other familiar cult movie standbys included Louise Fletcher of Brainstorm as the teacher Mrs. McKeitch, James Karen of Return of the Living Dead as the general and Laraine Newman as David’s on-screen mother. Special effects were provided by John Dykstra (“credited” for Space Mutiny) and  animatronics star Stan Winston, who had established himself with The Terminator and supporting effects for The Thing before making it big with Aliens and Predator. Like Lifeforce, the film was judged a financial failure, earning $4.9 million against a $7M budget. Critics both in the media and science fiction compared it very unfavorably to the original film, with some favorable comments on its effects and frequent references and inside jokes to 1950s films.

My own experiences with this one begins with a single sighting in college, when I saw maybe the last 15 or 20 minutes on cable TV. As usual, I had no idea what I was watching, and as far as I recall, I was quite baffled even then just trying to figure out when and by whom it was made. I think I identified it from the credits or by checking the TV guide, and I might have rented it not too long after. In any case, my memory gets fuzzy until I picked it up in a 2-pack with another movie I watched before deciding to review this one, meaning this is going to cost me another viewing if/ when I get back to the other movie. What stands out above all from my first encounter on is that this is the uncanny kind of “outlier” that feels like it was made too soon rather than too late. Much of this can be attributed to the influence of those who made it, especially Winston, not to mention the other films he contributed to. Even so, I still find something almost unnerving in the finale in particular, which feels like it should be in a ‘90s action “crossover” like Starship Troopers rather than a movie from the middling ‘80s.

If anything, it is the finale that is the problem, simply because it so easily overshadows the rest of the film, and if it is recounted in cold blood, there is no reason this should be the case. To begin with, the sets and creatures that appear at the end are all seen much earlier, and considering who was on board, they aren’t exactly “great”. Given that the one of the same guys somehow made the Alien Queen the same year, however, that shouldn’t be a major criticism. Ironically, the most unsettling effects sequences are the treacherous sand pit, further calling to mind Tremors of all things. Turning to the rest of the film, there’s plenty to like, or at least remember. While critics have singled out its frequently comedic tone compared to the dark atmosphere of the original (which I’m not even going to try to talk about), the movie achieves a balance that works, in its better moments akin if not quite equal to the social satire of a George Romero movie. We get some good paranoid moments when the protagonists end up in the already-compromised military base. The very best moments are between kid and the teacher. Fletcher in particular is more than game, conveying a personality that seems to welcome rather than resist the commands of the invaders. By comparison, the chemistry between Emerson and Black is almost underwhelming, though again that is a very minor complaint.

Now dammit, I’m already up to the “one scene” and I had to go with the finale and a moment I remembered from my very first fragmentary viewing. This time, I have to give a little buildup. By the end, the general is leading his men through the tunnels of the aliens’ hideout; as in the preceding scenes, there is a strong sense of coordination and comradery that compares favorably even to Aliens. They run into several drones, which are a little too jumbled to be convincing as organisms or a threat, but still interesting. Any flaws in the creatures are more than made up for by the environment itself, which looks like a natural cave with touches of both the biological and technological. As they round the corner, the general recognizes one of his own men coming the other way, last seen caught in the sand pit. He calls out, and their comrade answers by warning them to shoot him. He continues to repeat the same warning as he draws his own weapon and starts to fire. Only then do the general and the other troops start shooting themselves. It’s dark, gritty and poignant all at once, all done with surprising understatement, one more moment that feels far ahead of its time and all the more out of place in a movie actually rated PG!

That leaves the question, how does this movie stack up? And what does it really tell us about remakes? I can at least say that I’ve rated it higher than I necessarily expected to going in cold. It may not re-envision the material as completely or as well as The Thing or even The Blob, but it at least puts the old and new together into something that is still truly unique. As for the bigger picture, it should serve as a reminder that little if anything that we complain about now is truly new; after all, even Ben Hur was a remake of a film no older than the ‘80s movies are now. Fortunately, movies like this also prove that even a remake can be original, if the job is given to talented and creative people. If the people making movies now will pay attention, we can still have remakes that audiences can look forward to rather than dread.

Image credit Wrong Side of the Art.

Super Movies! The one that was a Superman movie without Superman

 

Title: Supergirl

What Year?: 1984

Classification: Weird Sequel/ Improbable Experiment

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

I’m back with another round of superhero movies, and this time we have our first sequel. I first picked up this one on my radar when I reviewed Superman 3 for the Space 1979 Threequel Trilogy. At that point, as often happens, I reviewed several movies from that especially tangled chapter of the franchise (if you’re tired of reboots now…), before deciding that the only one I could use was the one I had in mind all along. Still (also as usual), I wasn’t about to handle that much material without coming back to it sooner or later, which I suppose was a big part of how this feature came to be. So this time, I’m back with the next installment in the “original” superhero franchise, also noteworthy as the first to try replacing the hero with a heroine. Here is Supergirl, and it’s more of a mess than you probably heard.

Our story begins in the insular realm of Argo City, a city-state in the void of interdimensional space. We follow the interactions of an old man named Zaltar and his very odd niece Kara, whom he shows a relic called the Omegahedron that supplies the city’s power, which definitely should not be accessible to him. The point is proven when Kara accidentally blows the relic into the void. While Zaltar is being very justly sentenced to exile, she bolts to a transport to search for the Omegahedron on a world called Earth, where rumor tells her cousin Kal El has been making a name for herself. Kara discovers she has superpowers in Earth’s environs, which she naively experiments with, but soon assumes the alter ego of Linda Lee. Meanwhile, the Omegahedron has fallen into the hands of a self-styled witch named Selena, who simultaneously seeks world domination and a less than consensual romance with a handyman. When a misdirected love spell leaves the boy toy in love with Linda instead of Selena, our heroine finds herself in the witch’s sights. Right when it looks like the final showdown is at hand, the villainess finds a spell to send Supergirl to the Phantom Zone, where it turns out Zaltar is cooling his heels. Our heroine and her uncle must find a way back to Earth, or Selena will rein as queen forever.

As previously recounted, Supergirl arose from an attempt by producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind to continue the franchise after the apparent departure of Christopher Reeve. To that end, they introduced the character of Supergirl with a unique adversary and a new backstory seemingly at odds with that shown for Superman in both the comics and the earlier movies (though Argo City had apparently been seen before). The film was directed by Jeannot Szwarc (see Santa Claus The Movie), with Helen Slater in the title role and Faye Dunaway as Selena, after an inauspicious turn in the bio pic Mommy Dearest. Despite the borderline “reboot” premise, Marc McClure returned in the role of Jimmy Olsen, with numerous additional references to Superman and other characters from the previous films. Other supporting cast included Peter O’Toole as Zaltar and Mia Farrow as Kara’s mother. An original theme and score was provided by Jerry Goldsmith, replacing the music of one-time upstart John Williams. Two contemporary cuts were released, a 1 hr 45 min US “theatrical” cut and an “international” cut of over 2 hours; an additional 2 ½ hour “director’s cut” would later emerge on disc. The movie earned under $15 million on a $35M budget, contributing to the eventual separate production of Superman IV by the Cannon Group. (See… oh, to Hell with it all.)

At this point, I’m ready to go straight to my experience. Quite a while back, I looked this one up based on cursory descriptions that usually emphasized how different it was from the other movies. It made enough of a positive impression that I looked it up along with other movies mentioned above, and after that, things turn into a blur for a while. Among other things, it took me several months to conclude that the actual “theatrical” version has been totally unmovied, to the point that VHS tapes listed online repeatedly turned out to be one of the 2 hour cuts. Within the last few weeks, I finally bought a copy with each of the remaining versions, and watched both before I finally got around to writing this review. That all adds up to possibly the most pure legwork I’ve put into any of these reviews, and the upshot is that I’m definitely not feeling as “friendly” as I once did.

With all that out of the way, I can start with the good. Slater (best known to me for the ‘90s made-for-TV charmer 12:01 AM) is superb both as Supergirl and her alter ego, so much so that at one point I seriously double-checked if they had a different actress for Linda’s scenes. To me, it’s somehow more convincing to see her unexplained transformations from one identity to the other. As alluded, her character is odd and often childlike (at times uncomfortably so), yet always in ways that follow quite logically from the story and situations. This allows for intriguing twists on the genre formula as she discovers her powers with varying degrees of hesitation and clumsiness. (In fact, it’s somewhat suspiciously like the transformation of Peter Parker.) At the same time, she repeatedly makes confident if potentially foolhardy declarations to Selena and others who threaten her and her friends. Most interestingly, we see a corresponding learning curve for Selena, especially as she tries to use her magic without assistance from a former partner. The balance of power quickly hinges on who can master her abilities first, with plenty of convincing back and forth.

Things get hit or miss precisely when the movie tries to tie in to the preceding franchise. Far too much time is used with backstories that tie to characters we never see, obviously but not exclusively Superman himself. Again and again, it begs for the true reboot treatment; start with Supergirl, and let the big guy sit this one out. In my own personal quest, there were times I itched for a look at the theatrical cut just as proof that the movie could be cut down to size. An extra annoyance was the soundtrack, which was entirely disconcerting. I have previously written at length about my profound admiration for Jerry Goldsmith, but this movie’s theme sounds like what he might have turned in in exchange for his morning coffee. It’s still certainly not “bad”, and I won’t say the guy didn’t try, but for a composer who delivered the Deep Rising soundtrack for, well, Deep Rising, this is extremely disappointing.

Going back to the positives, the one thing this movie doesn’t get credit for at all is that it succeeds  in being “dark” long before the “gritty” reboot became compulsory. The key consideration is that this doesn’t happen all at once. We get touches when Selena turns to malign entities for power, and when the one-sided romance blooms for Linda. Then things get a big jolt when the witch summons an elemental entity to challenge Supergirl, visible only from the devastation in its wake. It’s a scene that gets made fun of, but I absolutely defend it as one of the best effects sequences in the whole 1970s/ ‘80s franchise. Finally, we have the big drop when Supergirl is dropped into the Phantom Zone, where she finds herself literally powerless.  (This coincides with an overtly comical yet reasoned sequence when the college kids try to meet Selena with protesting.) It’s wrenchingly pitiful to watch her try to fly and then crush or ignite the rocks. It’s all the more dispiriting when she meets Zaltar, already resigned to comforting himself with “squirts” from a flask he repeatedly offers, further musing, “Once you get used to it, I think it’s delicious.” Of course, the outcome is never in doubt, but it’s the journey that matters.

Finally, we’re overdue for the “one scene”, and I’m going with an early one. On first venturing into an Earth city, Kara draws the attention of two leering thugs. They openly comment on her figure, without showing any concern at her familiar uniform. She is unafraid, but innocent enough to question their behavior, which on consideration ought to have practically been weeded out by natural selection in a world where superheroes exist. In their replies, they come across like the toughs of Heavy Metal, articulate enough to express their urges without feeling a further need to justify themselves. It’s just enough to drive Supergirl to take action before departing. As the bad guys begin to recover, one says to the other, “Let’s keep quiet about this.”

What movies like this make me think of is watching a top-secret experimental Mach 3 stealth bomber crash because the pilot couldn’t relieve himself correctly. The actual fantasy/ superhero elements work perfectly well, at least when they are allowed to. It’s the mundane elements that fail over and over, a problem that similarly afflicted a film as distinguished as Hancock, but this time far too often when they were never needed. It still does enough right to rise to the rating I have given rather than getting docked down to it, but that does not dispel the feeling that it could have been so much better.

Image credit collectors.com.